Autumn colours on the Canal. Come for an even better walk!

 I asked friend Pam if she wanted to come along today, and she did, so we went to check out the Vintage/Antique/Collectibles Fair, and it was, shall we say, pretty much as I expected.  Not worth the effort for me.  I bought a couple of pieces of very old Cypriot copper, one is a beaten copper bowl, deep red with age. The other a little mug, with character.

Some lovely paintings in the window of the Ardent Gallery (building circa 1579 I believe).  The top one was my favourite.

This used to be my Bank, back in the day.  Never really noticed the Cupola on the top before.

After walking round the town, and a bite to eat and drink at Gregg's, we headed off towards the canal.  We had an absolutely lovely walk - it was really quite warm by the canal (town felt quite cold, as it always seems to feel colder than where you set out from) and we walked for an hour, taking in the colours, and the scenery, and saying hello to the many people, like us, out for a walk.  Fox (Pam's dog) thought it was wonderful too.

Mallards, in tens and nines.  It was roughly two drakes to every duck.

Those sherbert yellows were amazing.  There were a couple of these little pleasure hire boats out on the canal.

Reflections.

What I was trying to capture in these two reflections was the sort of visual refraction of the water, which had broken up into horizontal stripes across the canal.  It was fascinating to see, but I needed a camera better than the one on my phone. The 2nd photo shows it better.

We walked and walked and really didn't want to turn around and come back, but needs must.  It was such a magical walk, the sunshine and the colours, and the countryside - just absolutely lovely and we both really benefitted from being out.  We forgot all our troubles and the worlds' troubles and it just felt good to be alive.

Come for a walk . . .

 

As you can see, I got out for some fresh air today.  The courier for the parcel of carved wood panelling arrived just after 10.  I woke early and was out emptying the car, slowly, and now have everything put away bar the bookcase, which is just a bit too heavy for me to manage on my own.  Will get some help over the weekend.

I took myself to task, and began listing things on Ebay and Marketplace.  I have decided my spinning wheel has to go, and that is on Ebay now.  Hopefully it will sell, as it was completely overhauled and serviced back in June.  I've taken photos of a vintage Maasai beaded fly whisk, which is going on in the morning.  On Marketplace, I have put the "Grandfather" Windsor chair which has been here far too long.  I don't need it, and even at a giveaway price it hasn't sold at the Unit.  I've also listed the Indo-Persian tray (a really pretty one) I have had some years now (we moved with it).

I will do some book listings over the weekend too, and try to pass on Keith's scarcely-opened set of militaria books on German WWII daggers, and other collectable books he had.  I will sell what I can and then get my book-seller friend to come and offer on some of the others I no longer need.

It was a lovely day for a walk (the old railway line).  I was down to a 3/4 sleeve t-shirt after I'd gone half a mile.

Greatly enjoying the latest JD Kirk, Stateside.  It's making me laugh on just about every page, which is a positive.  Nicely distracted over on Instagram by a young couple who have gone to live on Bardsey Island (wardens I assume) - baptism of fire as storms Austen and Boelo arrived within hours of them landing and getting in the farmhouse.

This vibrant leaves are the Guelder Rose and its berries.  SO pretty.

I may give myself a run over to Brecon tomorrow, to check out the Vintage, Antiques and Collectables market and see if it's worth doing to try and get rid of oldest pre-Covid things.  I want to empty the Library as much as possible and get rid of two bookshelves too (one is HUGE, used to be a wardrobe).  I was chatting to a friend in Dorset who has a wonderful social life, always going on interesting coach trips.  None of those round here - I'd have to be in Cardiff or Swansea I think.

I used to know what this little purple flower was - one of the Geranium tribe I think.  I am being too lazy to get one of my botanical books . . .

Right, this won't do.  Time to do a bit more stitching.

Just as well . . .

 . . . that I decided to knock the Unit on the head.  Last month I sold just two things, so took home £40.50.  It cost me £30 in fuel to go and pack it all away in the car and bring it home.  Rent was £150 a month, so I will draw a line under that and move on.  I have decided to list furniture items on Marketplace and see if I can make a bit of much-needed room.  I have also decided to call out my book-dealer friend and see what he will give me for surplus books, some of them Keith's militaria ones, some collectible ones virtually brand new and scarcely touched as they were gifts in the last few years of his life.  I will give some a try on Ebay and Marketplace first.

I did a bit of shopping on the way there.  I stopped at Chris Thomas's and got two giant cucumbers £1.20 each, a big cauliflower £1.50 (big for me anyway, for the same price I could have had one twice the size) and 3 big easy peelers for £1.  The photos of good produce (OK some imported as not many Mango or Pineapple farms round here) are a positive in the current world where it looks like farms world-wide are going to be destroyed/covered over with solar or wind "farms" and data centres and meat is going to be grown in the lab . . .

Then on to Tesco for Trail Mix, peanuts, toothpaste and mixed wild and LG rice.

I am feeling very worried and depressed by - and trying not to read - posts about Data Centres and how they seem to be going up regardless of any environmental worries/considerations (to put it mildly).  All of a sudden the reason for the bun-fight over wrecking the countryside from Land's End to John O'Groats with gigantic windfarms and pylons is all making sense as clearly this will be to feed the maws of the Data Centres.  Us lesser mortals have no say in the matter as it is clearly a done deal long before we ever got a sniff about it, let alone having our noses rubbed in it.  I don't really want to live in a world like this, and nor does anyone else I should think.  But money - American money and power that is - speaks.  

I think I will go for a long walk tomorrow to try and clear my head of negativity.

Rainbows

 I am back to just having the cats for company now.  Rosie has been exhausted today and they left mid-afternoon as the Tesco delivery was going to be early. I should think she is glad to be back home again.  She fell asleep on Tam's lap earlier, as she was so tired.  Tamzin is exhausted. I feel pretty weary too, from the worry and having a house-full to cook for again, though Rosie wasn't really in much of an eating mood.

I managed to get a short walk in, but of course I'd hardly gone 100 yards before it began to rain.  Hence I was only out for half an hour or so.  It was good to get some fresh air though.

Sunshine, showers and rainbows throughout the walk.

You can just about make out the shape of the church beneath those power lines crossing the picture.

DId I mention I had sold some carved pieces of wood on Facebook Marketplace but they were being Couriered rather than picked up locally?  I had wrapped them up in a very unflattering shape box as it wasn't long enough for the 2 rectangular pieces to lay flat.  Then I found out that the Courier wanted two layers of cardboard around the contents.  I got another box from town, but it looked even worse after I had used half a roll of sticky brown tape to beat it into submission.  The more I thought about it on my walk, the more I could hear Keith telling me I had made a proper lash-up of THAT job, so when Tam & co went home, I took the scissors to the brown tape, moved a box full of Pam's cooking apples into a Bag for Life, and got the wooden pieces packaged, lieing FLAT, and taped with the other half of the sticky brown tape.  Goodness, I felt like I had done a couple of rounds with Cassius Clay. . .

I have had a phonecall from chap who has the shop my Unit is in.  When am I clearing it?  Thursday . . .  He has someone new going in on Monday.  Good luck to 'em.

I am going to spend tomorrow taking photos and listing furniture type things on Marketplace, and then some of my old stock to try and clear it.  I am very disenchanted with Fairs etc at present . . .

I have just started reading one of the most recent J D Kirk books, Stateside, which is keeping me amused.  I read his Duty of Care over the weekend.

Thank you for all your kind comments.  Off to stitch and watch tv now.

Another of those scary days - trying to keep busy

 You may remember it's a trip to the hospital at Cardiff today for poor little Rosie.  She has to be anaethstetised for her steroid injections in her knee again.  I'm trying not to think about it.  She wouldn't eat the toast or scrambled egg we set up for her breakfast, only yoghurt and a mini trifle . . .  I am very worried about Tam's health too, especially her breathing.  I will get her to use my peak flow reader tonight to see how bad it is.  She HAS to go back to the Dr.

So I am working on this cushion cover.  It is a bit of a challenge as it's 100% pure cotton and hard to get the needle through especially for the tiny stitches like the dark green leaves which are tiny chain stitch.  I haven't decided what colour to do the words yet.  I am oversewing the central parts of the primroses with a single strand chain stitch in a brighter yellow.  The one-twist French knots are fiddly and so many of them!

More watching Tales From the Green Valley this afternoon.  

It sounds like Storm Boelo had a real impact on Scotland as it passed through.  We were fortunate as that one was well above us, just a bit wet and windy here, and we were on the edge of Storm Austen, so got off lightly this time.

I am glad that folk seemed to enjoy the last few posts and I feel I know some of you a lot better.

So, away to sew and hopefully not dwell on my worries.

UPDATE: no delays and all done and she is back on the ward scoffing strawberries and magic stars and Pringles and looking like nothing has happened.  P.H.E.W.

Influences - what were yours?

 Not InfluenCERS.  Books, people,  experiences.  You all know about my love of history and archaeology.  Folklore, myths and legends too.  The school library was helpful with this as I can remember getting out books on Greek Mythology, and our English teacher introduced me to Georgette Heyer.  We also read Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth, which I adored.   Our history teacher was pretty useless - after learning about the Romans, history seemed to go downhill for me as it was all names and dates and absolutely nothing real about the people who had made that history or lived through it.  It wasn't until I left school and was able to read about the things which interested me that I could broaden my knowledge.  Not so much about archaeology as our local library only seemed to have books about Egyptian archaeology, and that soon palled.

I wasn't interested in sewing, but someone I shared a house with was making a hexagon patchwork quilt and thus began my interest in patchwork, helped by my visiting the American Museum at Bath.  Some amazing American quilts there.

I was an absolutely HOPELESS cook to start with - mum was too, so I could hardly learn from her - yet my gran had been an amazing cook, but it never got passed on to mum.  Yet I learned, and found an interest in baking, and learned to make my own bread in 1980, after going to an evening at Eling Tide Mill at Totton, where we were shown how to make bread by hand.  Since my dad's grandfather had been a Journeyman Baker, perhaps that came down in my genes.  My cheese bread was always very well received.

When I discovered John Seymour's book about Self Sufficiency, that was my way forward too - though the idea of ever owning five acres to be self sufficient on seemed unlikely!  I read all the books by Derek Tangye too, about their idyllic life on a Cornish cliff, growing daffodils and flowers for posies which went to London, and growing tomatoes too in the summer months.  Then I discovered Elizabeth West's Hovel in the Hills.  I read that so many times. She wrote a second one, Kitchen in the Hills.  I remember seeing that in a bookshop window in Rhayader, whilst on a coach trip to the Elan Valley (from Salisbury, when I lived there) and spent my lunch money buying it - think it was about 12/6d (that would be 65 pence now). Her third book was Garden in the Hills. They lived in North Wales, halfway up a mountain, in a cottage which really, had been for summer living when pasturing sheep up on the mynydd.  It certainly didn't lend itself to living in the winter as it was incredibly damp, leaked and was cold and miserable.  They lived on so little money that at the end of winter sometimes they were reduced to living off the garden weeds to have food inside them.  Things were extremely . . . basic.  All the same, they were inspiring, and her husband Alan was very practical.  

With the coming of the internet, in the early years of this century (gosh, that sounds rather Victorian doesn't it?), television programmes such Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's wonderful River Cottage and Dick Strawbridge's It's Not Easy Being Green set up their own forums, which I joined.  There were programmes called Victorian Kitchen, the Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm etc.  Have those on DVD and watch regularly.  My favourite was probably Tales from the Green Valley.  All so very "me".

I also discovered and joined a private online forum with mostly ladies who gardened, made bread, made soap, made jams, chutneys, jellies, cooked from scratch, baked, embroidered, made patchwork . . .  you get the picture.  They were a lovely bunch and I learned so much.  Sadly, these things never last forever.

When I met Keith, we were both interested in antiques, which my dad loved too - still remember watching Going for a Song with him.  We would look in Antique Shop windows, but because we didn't have any money to purchase anything, didn't want to waste the shop-owners' time by going inside "just to look". Keith and I went to Dorchester on a day out when we were first together and saw a sign for an auction at Stinsford School, right beside the beautiful church where Thomas Hardy's heart and his family members are buried.  Of course, we went, and the rest is history!

We ended up in Wales because I had a penpal here back in the early 1970s and holidayed at Ferryside, Carmarthenshire.  When we were househunting and the prices in the West Country (Devon) were going up literally week on week, I said why don't we look in Carmarthenshire?  Well, we did and Wales is still my home.

My degree course was a huge influence on my interest in archaeology and my main passion for Prehistory developed into a deep interest in the Pictish symbol stones, the subject of my Dissertation.  From this has grown my interest in Early Christian Monuments, and we have plenty of those all over Wales.  This has led to bothering Churches as that is where most of them are found :)

So, I would love to know what turned you into the person you are today, and what your passions and interests are.

P.S.  I did a quick shop this morning as I needed food for when Tam, Jon & Rosie are here Sunday - Tuesday, and picked up the latest Today's Quilter magazine.  I was half-tempted but put my glasses on to read the price.  £8.99!  I don't think so!

P.P.S.  Have Beef Goulash in the oven (very 70s), and am sat down with my embroidery watching, wait for it, Tales of the Green Valley, on Youtube.  Sat watching the rain outside and trees blowing around a bit.

Less is more - what could you live without?

 I was pondering this whilst reading posts on an American site (Grandma Donna, have you come across her?)  She and her husband are quite elderly but getting more fed up with the modern way of living and have been researching and experimenting with life as it was lived in the 1940s.  It's certainly food for thought.

Firstly, and how could I ever forget them - I couldn't be without my cats.

Folk in the comments on her site were talking about people having new kitchens put in and all-new appliances too, but some people weren't bothering with dishwashers any more, as they didn't last very long - built in obsolescence I suppose.  I have never had one, but Tam has.  Not sure if it really helps with their "I hate washing up" as the really dirty things, greasy pans etc, and certain items still have to be washed by hand.  Keith was my washer upper, now I have to do it all myself!

We made our washing machine last 17 years by Keith changing the brushes on it regularly.  My latest one has a 10 year parts guarantee so hopefully it will last 10 years!  A washing machine is an essential of course.  My poor mum had to make do with the "copper" in the corner of the kitchen.  She was thrilled to bits when she finally got a twin-tub!  When I was first married, the first time (married twice, divorced once) I didn't have a washing machine and having a husband in the motor trade, can still remember having to take a stout nail brush and washing soap to try and scrub out the worst of the oil on his jeans.  Drying was a pull-out stretchy drying rack over the bath . . .

Which brings me to tumble driers.  Had one once, wouldn't bother again. 

Fabric conditioner - don't bother.  I haven't used it for nearly 50 years and have never missed it.  Total waste of money, and it pongs something awful.  NOT a natural just-washed-line-dried smell at all!  Yuk.  Febreeze comes under the same heading, along with plug-in air conditioners.

An electric blanket - only just started using mine again to take the chill off the bed, but I have returned to hot water bottles - my feet get cold and in winter, that's no fun.  I have a daytime electric blanket to drape over me which costs very little to run but can just heat me rather than turning the central heating on to heat the whole house when it's cool rather than chilly.  

Central heating - yes please!  In a house with no fireplace, it's non-negotiable.  I use it sparingly and have it on just 17 deg when I do have it on.  It would be upped if snow/frost outside.

A kettle.  Can manage without that.  Until recently I heated just a mug full of water up in a pan on the hot ring of my stove, but then noticed that even the little bit of steam from heating that (and not turning the extractor fan on) had lifted the covering on the end of the wall cupboard beside it.)

A vacuum cleaner.  Yes that's a must-have.  When Keith and I first at Ynyswen, mine broke and our financial state was so parlous we couldn't afford to buy another.  I remember having to go round the carpets with a stiff brush and dustpan.  I do not recommend that for one room, let alone the entire house, especially when we had inherited awful nylon carpets with the house.  The one in the living room had to go straight away because years of muddy farm boots from the cow-hand living there had "embellished" it!  

A breadmaker.  Useful as I can just bung the ingredients in, go out and 3 hours later I will have a loaf.  I can of course still make bread by hand if I want to, but it's nice to be able to raise the dough reliably to ready to cook in the oven, to get a good crust.  In a cold kitchen, you have to wait longer for it to rise.

A microwave - not essential.  Handy for re-heating small portions (I recall putting leftover meals on plates, covering with a dish and steaming over a pan of boiling water to reheat them.)

A shower.  I grew up with shallow wartime baths (still do that - WHAT a waste of water having a deep one and wallowing in it for ages).  I get in, wash, and out again.  It's good to have the shower hose/nozzle for washing hair, but I grew up washing mine in the kitchen sink, so it could be done again if no shower available.  

A radio.  I used to have it on all the time in the kitchen, listening to Radio 4, but since moving here I have gotten out of the habit.  I prefer to listen to podcasts when I am working in the kitchen, or upstairs sewing.

TV is non-negotiable to me as it stops me being quite so lonely, and I watch all sorts of documentaries which keep my brain active.  The first winter here on my own was so lonely, but I used to have Kate at The Last Homely House on regularly and she was like having a friend in the room, one who quilted!  The subscription to Sky was the first thing I stopped, and then the subscriptions to Ancestry/Find my Past.  I may just get a month's subscription in January which is a long house-bound month.

Books - another non-negotiable.  I use our local library, and also look for good books on the charity bookcases in supermarkets.  Rarely do I buy a new book from a shop/on line.

Computer and Internet - don't be daft! Another way of keeping touch, learning things, shopping etc.  Saves me on the shopping as my nearest big towns aren't near at all!!

A car - an essential, on many levels.  

Well, enough of me wittering on.  I fear we have all gotten far too used to "having everything".  Sometimes less is more.